ER’s uncharacteristic self-reproach was usually eclipsed by her deeper resentment of her mother-in-law, and her enduring dismay that her husband had never chosen to leave his mother’s domain. She never understood her husband’s refusal to build his own nest, to create for himself and his family his own space apart from his mother. There was, of course, Warm Springs, but that was his home apart from his family—into which she fit only on a slant. ER’s feelings about her mother-in-law were bound up in her even more complicated feelings about her husband.
SDR had in fact changed profoundly to accommodate ER’s public interests and her son’s career. Always publicly loyal, on some issues she was one of ER’s best allies. But ER never felt that room had actually been made for her at SDR’s hearth, nor in her heart. SDR was contemptuous of ER’s brother Hall and his children. She even treated his nine-year-old daughter, Eleanor, meanly: swirled her around, then pushed her away. “So this is Hall’s daughter,” and never said a word to the girl.*
SDR dominated her homes, and the family finances. Above all, she sought to control her grandchildren and direct their interests. Over the years she had bypassed ER’s concerns, sabotaged her efforts at discipline, ignored her feelings. ER felt a transgressor at home—in homes that were always her mother-in-law’s homes. Whenever anything went right, SDR took all the credit; whenever anything went wrong, she blamed ER.
Concerning the children’s divorces, she was accusatory, judgmental, harsh. ER bore the brunt of her disapproval, and it made her feel an outsider in a land of strangers.
ER did not dwell long in that land; she had other spaces for escape, and friends for warm sustenance. But each family situation that concerned her husband, his mother, their children, pressed upon her heart, flattened her mind and spirit as she struggled to balance her feelings and be a good and helpful parent.
As ER contemplated her life and the future in June 1934, her thoughts turned to her increasingly unsettled relationship with Hick. She prepared for their July holiday with care, and considered her responsibility for their current tensions.
When Hick entered the swift currents of ER’s social and private whirl, she anticipated private islands of time reserved for her alone. ER initially encouraged that expectation and gave Hick reason to believe that she was the First Lady’s First Friend.
But their relationship had become an emotional roller-coaster. Because ER preserved their correspondence, we can follow the arc of love and longing, ardor and disappointment detailed by their letters, which wove a paper tapestry from September 1933 to the summer of 1934.
Unwilling to keep a diary, as Hick suggested, ER agreed to detail her day for the historical record—and for Hick who intended to write her biography. When Emma Bugbee asked about “doing a book on me,” ER “was quite frank and told her I wouldn’t want one now, and I had promised to work with you on it, and because I couldn’t keep a diary, I was sending you daily doings for future reference. She was very nice about it and said she quite understood.”
ER felt free to complain to Hick, to confide in her; and only in her surviving letters to Hick do we have a record of her moods alongside moments of vast historical import.
On 17 November 1933, for example, Russia was formally recognized and Henry Morgenthau was sworn in as Secretary of the Treasury, to replace the ailing William Woodin. But ER considered it a “fruitless day,” because the festivities interfered with her ride: “I started to ride & then Litvinov was late & Henry Morgenthau wanted a ceremony,” and by then it was noon “and too late to ride.”
But “Russia is recognized,” and William Bullitt was selected and soon “goes as Ambassador. I wonder if that is why FDR has been so content to let Missy play with him! She’ll have another embassy to visit next summer anyway! I hope Henry will do well in the Treasury, it is a big responsibility.”
On another occasion ER sent Hick a note about the surprising hurdles women faced, often in their own homes:
I thought the enclosed might amuse you. It is a letter from Mama to FDR:
“Dont let all the women pester you about their pet things and affairs in the north and west! I do think some things and ideas are over-done, and I would always consider a really good and intelligent man’s opinion first…. Your father used to say: ‘Most women go off half cocked and have neither logic nor justice.’ You have both. Ever your —Mummy.”
FDR was evidently also amused by his mother’s letter, which he handed over to his wife.
ER rarely acknowledged feeling hurt or insulted and fled from moments of solitude and reflection. She filled her time with mundane chores and details. They forestalled depression, and relaxed her mind. Each month she paid her own bills and balanced her own checkbooks. By 1934 she had five checkbooks, and she balanced each separate account, which gave her some semblance of regular control over her increasingly complicated life. ER confided her feat to Bess Furman, who considered it “incredible”:
1. Washington house; 2. New York house; 3. Washington personal check book; 4. New York personal check book; 5. “The account of what I earn.” She further differentiated these [accounts] by signing her name a different way in each. And they always all came out to the penny.
ER bragged to Hick that she balanced all her books on the train between New York and Baltimore. This was accomplished after a whirlwind day in New York, where she “bought Louis some clothes, started my [graduate Todhunter] class, spoke at the Junior League lunch, tried on two dresses at Milgrim’s, was at my [Val-Kill] furniture sale for an hour … 5 to 6:30 spent with Cousin Susie. Then went and dined with Louis. Nan is happy because in two days we’ve sold $3,000 worth of stuff….”
On return to Washington that night:
[There were] six for tea and saw my chicks [grandchildren Sistie and Buzzie] to say good night… dressed, and had Molly Dewson to dine. She stayed till 10, and I longed to work, but since she left I’ve finished my checks, and signed all the mail….
Missy has a head cold and went to bed before dinner, and Franklin is worried about her. We have had a little flurry with Gus [Gennerich, FDR’s bodyguard]. His feelings were hurt but all is well again. I often wonder why people want to make each other unhappy….
Hick, darling: FDR finds your reports most interesting…. I used your stories yesterday and shall again today.
Whenever Hick was despondent, and doubted the value of her work, ER reassured her:
What a picture you can paint! I nearly wept. If ever under any circumstances you give up writing, I’ll flay you, whether I’m here in the flesh or flay you from some other world! You feel too much to live constantly in the midst of misery, and in the meantime nothing is going to happen to me, and, if you didn’t follow me around a little, I’d have to start following you, and that would be much harder!
During the holiday season, ER resigned herself to public gossip about her children’s marital crises. ER supported her daughter’s divorce and Anna’s new relationship with journalist John Boettiger. But she was unsettled when Louis Howe told her that during a meeting with a group of reporters one of them “casually mentioned … ‘now that John B has his divorce I supposed we’ll soon hear of Mrs. Dall’s getting hers!’”
ER wrote Hick: “One cannot hide things in this world can one? How lucky you are not a man!”
No matter how much she longed for Hick, ER enjoyed her other friendships. She spent a weekend with Earl Miller and Tiny Chaney to help Earl move into his new house. “I love doing houses even someone else’s.” They worked until “one AM, but slept well. Tiny and I in the big double bed which was comfortable … only I wished it was you. Darling I’m beginning to be very impatient.”
Hick too was impatient. She ended a sixteen-page report, lonely and gloomy in Iowa, with one triumphant thought: “Darling only 18 more days!”
ER promised to make time for a happy reunion in Washington. “There may be people staying here so I think one night anyway we’ll stay away as otherwise we might have to be polite.”
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br /> In the Midwest, Hick’s letters were filled With worry that colleagues speculated about their friendship. But ER was sanguine: “Dear one, and so you think they gossip about us, well they must at least think we stand separations rather well! I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little what ‘they’ say!…”
On 28 November Hick wrote ER as she traveled for her Thanksgiving holiday to Minnesota. Her ten-page letter included the case of a seventy-year-old couple, a carpenter and his wife, who insisted that they would “rather starve than be on relief.” And they were starving. “Now will you please tell me,” Hick wrote, “what in the world one is going to do about cases like these.”
It was for Hick a lonely Thanksgiving. “I suppose you arrived in Warm Springs today. Well I probably wouldn’t be very happy there anyway. Oh—I guess I’m probably a little jealous. Forgive me….” ER confided that she had a secret “little longing that FDR might think I’d like you to be here and insist on your coming to report to him. You know how one dreams?…”
They spoke several times on the telephone that weekend, and Hick continued to hear gossip about their friendship, but ER wrote: “Darling I know they bother you to death because you are my friend,” but someday “I’ll be back in obscurity again and then no one will care except ourselves!”
Despite her divided heart, ER enjoyed the communal Thanksgivings at Warm Springs. She presided with FDR at the festive dinner for children and adults with polio in the rehabilitation program. The amazing spirit and good cheer which radiated from FDR to the smallest child energized the entire community and made every challenge seem possible.
The weekend was relaxed and friend-filled. Nancy Cook busied herself taking photos; ER walked in the woods with Ruby Black and Marion Dicker-man, and rode each day. Still, she missed Hick: “I love you tenderly and deeply and oh! I want you to have a happy life. To be sure I’m selfish enough to want it to be near me but we wouldn’t either of us be happy otherwise would we?”
From somewhere in timber country, Minnesota, Hick wrote:
Not a bad hotel and one day nearer you. Only 8 more days. 24 hours from now it will be only 7 more—just a week.
I’ve been trying today to bring back your face to remember just how you look! Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips. I wonder what you will do when we meet, what we’ll say. Well, I’m rather proud of us, aren’t you? I think we’ve done rather well.
Hick felt better in Minnesota: The countryside was beautiful, people fascinating, and the Republicans “completely disorganized.” She thought that “the President would have got a kick out of” the icy, slippery road she drove on that day through second-growth pines to observe a state reforestation program. “We drove for miles” sliding on “ice almost as bad as the time you and I drove down to New York from Hyde Park the Sunday before March 4th. Remember?” The president would have loved the dangerous ride, and the grand work the CCC boys had done in the area.
After her adventure, Hick relaxed in the hotel lobby before the president’s speech and listened to the conversations all over the room, filled with high regard and the “popularity of FDR.” As she considered the changes actually under way, Hick contemplated ER’s role, and her own: “The Woman’s Occupational Bureau, for instance…. We do things together don’t we? & it’s fun.” Hick never got much credit for her ideas, relating to women especially, many of which ER popularized.
After FDR’s speech, Hick added:
Well, he came through marvelously and I think it was about the best speech I ever heard him make. You’d have got a kick, if you could have seen the crowd so quiet and attentive.
You know—it is a rather thrilling experience to hear the president of the U.S. on the radio in the lobby of a hotel in Bemidji, Minnesota. Especially when he makes a speech like the one we just heard…. Please congratulate him for me.*
Goodnight, dear one. I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now—I shall!
Hick’s Minnesota rhapsody included an amusing encounter in Hibbing:
My dear I’m feeling confused and indignant. An elevator boy just said to me: “Are you a girl scout leader?” “No,” [I replied] but “why do you ask?” “Because of your uniform,” he explained:
I’m wearing that old dark grey skirt—the one you never liked—with a grey sweater and to soften the neckline a little, I wear the dark red Liberty scarf of mine knotted about the throat. That costume, topped off by a brimmed felt slouch hat and supported by low-heeled golf shoes, oh, Lord, I wonder how many people in the farm belt these last few weeks have thought I was a girl scout leader! My very soul withers in anguish….
Throughout December, ER’s letters to Hick grew more ardent, and she concluded her letter of 6 December with a stunning promise: “I love you and when this is over I’m going to think of nothing else!”
As Hick prepared for their reunion, she confessed: “You are going to be shocked when you see me. I should be returning to you wan and thin from having lived on a diabetic diet.” That was, alas, not the case:
Just you and Dr. McIntire try to live on green vegetables and fruit, without starch or sugar, in country hotels, where they have nothing but meat, bread, potatoes, pie and cake and see how far you’d go…. Besides I feel so perfectly well, and I’m living such an active life…. I have an appetite that would do justice to Paul Bunyan himself…. Ever hear of Paul Bunyan … he used to bite off the tops of Jack pines with his teeth! [After long days trudging through snow,] Lady, I get hungry!
To a lost letter concerning Hick’s hangover ER replied: “Dear one, I never thought you were feeling badly from drinking. It never even crossed my mind. I never think of that unless it’s obvious. I suppose, because it does not attract me, I never think of other women doing it!”
Hick’s distressed letters and discontented outbursts had caused ER to worry about her health in general terms. She did not stop to think that a particularly unruly or upsetting letter might also be a drunken ramble. ER’s level of denial was high, since even fleeting considerations of a drinking problem turned to thoughts of her childhood. Her father’s erratic behavior imparted a painful emotional legacy. Especially when she was happy, in love, in a state of anticipation, fears of disappointment, betrayal, abandonment intruded. ER knew the pattern, and referred to it: “Dear one it is getting nearer and nearer and I am half afraid to be so happy. It is the way I felt as a child when I dreaded a disappointment! I love you dearly.”
For all ER’s promises for their reunion, she had not adjusted her unrelenting schedule. There were several stolen moments between endless rounds of obligations. The entire family and other friends had arrived for the holidays. Even times reserved exclusively for each other were preempted. Hick was on vacation, with nothing to do but wait. She spent hours alone in her West Wing room, tried to read a book, paced, gazed out over Lafayette Park.
It was puzzling: Had ER merely ignored White House demands in her nightly letters of romance and fantasy? Or was she unable to give time to herself, and so sabotaged her own good time? Had she acted like her father, and unconsciously treated lonely waiting Hick as she had been treated? Whatever the cause, ER’s neglect created a stormy situation. With little she cared to do as she waited for ER’s company, Hick felt like an intruder. Angry and hurt, she left for New York.
Subsequent letters reveal that ER had actually reserved only one evening for quiet time with Hick. Then, without warning, ER spent their one special evening with her distressed daughter.
After a week of telephone calls, their correspondence resumed on 23 December. Hick’s abrupt departure jostled ER, who resolved to make amends:
Hick dearest. It was good to have a few minutes with you [on the phone] last night and I went to sleep saying a little
prayer, ‘God give me depth enough not to hurt Hick again.’ Darling I know I’m not up to you in many ways but I love you dearly and I do learn sometimes…. Bless you and forgive me and believe me you’ve taught me more & meant more to me than you know and I will be thankful Christmas eve and Christmas day and every day for your well being in the world….
Hick wrote Anna to explain her departure and ER wrote: “Anna read a part of your letter this morning and she said she hadn’t been able to understand it and thought we must have had a fearful fight. But I told her no, you were just feeling very low.” About their lost evening, ER explained the competing tugs that pulled at her heart: “Darling the love one has for one’s children is different and not even Anna could be to me what you are….”
Although ER regretted that Hick was not with them, the Roosevelts’ first White House Christmas was filled with children and good cheer:
Dinner was jolly & then FDR read parts of the Christmas Carol & John B whispered to me it was the nicest day he ever had & he would never forget it! The young ones then went dancing….
We drank a toast to absent friends whom we would like to have with us at dinner & I thought of you dear one as I proposed it….
Determined to get Hick to return, ER called and then wrote:
It was good to hear your voice & you shall dine in bed & sleep all you want if you’ll just stay here & be happy. Don’t think I don’t know what it is like to be jealous, or to want to be alone, because I know both emotions full well….
No dear, you shouldn’t make believe you are happy for me nor like things you don’t like on my account.
ER assured Hick that once she arrived and settled in for the week everything would improve between them. And it did. Their pleasant week between Christmas and New Year’s was followed by a new tone in their letters, and in their friendship. When ER no longer took Hick’s presence for granted and altered her schedule, Hick became positively cheerful.
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